Socialism and "Big Government"

There is not a form of left-anarchism or revolutionary socialism which states as its aim the strengthening of the state. This is a consistent fallacy propogated against socialism, the aim of which, ultimately, is the “withering away of the state”. The state is necessary, in the final analysis, to maintain the status quo where there is inequality and class division. So capitalism, despite everything the right-wing claim to say about “big government” desperately needs the state and its various institutions for its very survival. We see this in times of economic crises, when private banks and corporations look to the state to save them. We also see it most obviously through how the state maintains an army and police whose force is used in the interests of expanding / defending profit making markets and private property respectively. The aim of many socialists (and not all socialists and anarchists agree with each other on this) is to take control the state in order to use its institutions to implement socialist law and as a necessary to dismantling the state altogether. For a clear exposition on how reformist socialists, revolutionary socialists and anarchists define the state and its purpose etc., a good starting point is Lenin’s ‘State and Revolution’ which was written during the Russian Revolution in 1917. It’s freely available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/